On March 17th, I got in my little car, a Peugeot 108 whose gasoline engine gets about 50 miles to the gallon, and drove to one of the cheapest gas stations around. Not many people go there. The station, though run by a major “hypermarket,” as the French call their biggest supermarkets, is rundown and nearly all the pumps, out-of-order. On Friday only one island was open.
With one car in front of me, I didn’t wait long. My turn came. I filled the tank, paying the equivalent of $8.33 for a gallon of gas—and prices are down since early March.
Price in liters, not gallons! (and this is no my station)
That task done, I felt good. Now I needed to stock up on food. I went into the hypermarket to get some basics. Then, I drove to a local farm with a produce store. I bought lots of apples and pears and vegetables for a hearty soup. At the farm, I bought fresh chicken; at the supermarket, fish and even some “industrial bread,” as the French call sliced, packaged bread as opposed to a fresh baguette. Once back home, I put the chicken, fish and bread in the freezer.
Now I felt really good. I was ready for whatever might happen next, at least for a couple of weeks.
I peeled and diced vegetables, put them in the soup pot and let them simmer as I organized the kitchen. Then, I changed into my gardening clothes and headed to my new “mini-farm,” a plot of land I’ve rented from a local family for less than $100 a year. Now it’s mine to cultivate. For the moment, I’m busy turning the earth and hoeing. It’s work that relaxes my body and empties my mind.
Which brings me back to the title of this article, to Madame la Marquise and the dead dog. Readers may have seen recent images of France in flames, cars on fire in the streets of Paris, Bordeaux or Marseilles, garbage piling up in the capital, rats running rampant. In Marseilles, France’s second biggest city, gasoline is hard to come by. Everywhere, there are threats of power outages. In fact, last evening, at least 3 times, my lights went out.
If you’ve been reading my articles over the years, you’ve seen this before, as recently as December 2018, when the “Gilets jaunes,” the “Yellow Vests,” ordinary people from all over France who’d simply had enough, were occupying Paris every weekend, and blocking busy intersections all over France.
At this present moment of social unrest, however, a threshold has been crossed. I will not enter into all the technical details except to say that on March 16, 2023, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced to the French Parliament that the government’s bill to raise the legal retirement age to 64 would not be submitted to a parliamentary vote. Instead, using an article of the French constitution known as 49.3, which allows the President to bypass Parliament, she declared the bill law.
No negotiations with the unions, outright lies about the bill’s contents, and then the denial of a democratic vote. Putting aside the contents (and there are gross injustices for those who begin working young—many, still today, enter the French workforce at age 16), the French have some things to be angry about.
I have not been protesting. I’ve been gardening. Perhaps it’s because I’m already retired. I left teaching when I was almost 67. Perhaps it’s my way of dealing with a general sense of doom that hangs over France these days.
Last month I wrote about drought. It continues and water rationing has begun. On March 18th, while antigovernment protesters marched in Paris, in the southern city of Perpignan, locals marched in a religious procession, imploring Saint Gaudérique, the patron saint of farmers, to send rain to that corner of southwest France. Miraculously, later the same day, 3 weeks of rain fell in the space of 3 hours.
The rest of France has not been so lucky, or should I say, blessed. Without rain, harvests are in peril. If workers in refineries and powerplants remain on strike, gas, oil and electricity supplies will be in jeopardy. And meanwhile, war rages in Ukraine, 700 miles from the French border, with arms supplies in the European Union running low.
Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise! No news, or what killed the dog! When I sat down to write this article, I already knew about Madame la Marquise, but I had never heard of the early 20th century vaudeville routine about “No News,” a darkly humorous dialogue between a rich man and his servant.
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The man, returning home after a rest cure where he lived cut off from the world, asks what’s new. “No news,” says the servant, but then the litany begins: the dog’s death, the snowball setting off an avalanche. The man has lost everything: home and stables up in flames; mother-in-law dead; wife gone. She ran off with the chauffeur. Not easy to be the bearer of bad news when you’re telling it to your employer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4KmtR5fz2U
“Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,” a 1935 musical version, is the French take on the same theme (1967 version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlI8sKMblmo). Madame la Marquise, an aging aristocrat, phones her valet. Tout va très bien! Everything’s fine—except your old gray mare is dead. And as in “No News,” that’s the sugar to sweeten the tragic pill: your stables, the château, burned to the ground when your husband, in financial ruin, knocked over a candle as he committed suicide…
Once I wrap up this article, I’m heading back to my garden. Before I do, I’d like to mention one of the best known versions of “No News,” by Frank Crumit, a singer, humorist and radio star, who recorded the routine in 1928. In a 1929 routine, “A Tale of the Ticker,” Crumit predicted the impending crash of ‘29. As for “Madame la Marquise,” it was a hit-song in France during the years leading up to WWII. Much more recently, it was used by strikers only last week, replacing the marquise with the name of President Macron.
The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire recommends we cultivate our gardens, but we must not bury our heads in the sand!
